C/2007N3＜Lulin彗星＞

＊　発見事情　＊ It gives me great pleasure to add this particular comet to my tally. When I was preparing to get "Countdown" underway in early 2007 I put out requests on, among other places, the Yahoo! comets mailing list group, for experienced comet observers to act as mentors for the student participants of "Countdown;" among those who answered my call was Quanzhi Ye, a student at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, and who works with the Lulin Sky Survey that is conducted from Taiwan. Less than half a year later he came through in a big way, with his discovery of this comet. Quanzhi discovered his comet on July 11, 2007, when it appeared as an essentially stellar object of 19th magnitude; because it wasn't immediately apparent on the discovery images that it was a comet (which had to wait for larger telescopes to determine) it was assigned the name "Lulin" as opposed to "Ye." Its unimpressive appearance at the time was likely due to the fact that it was then a year and a half away from perihelion passage, and was located relatively far from the sun and Earth (6.38 AU and 5.66 AU, respectively). The orbit is distinctly unusual in that its inclination is 178.4 degrees, i.e., it is almost exactly retrograde, being inclined only 1.6 degrees from the plane of Earth's orbit. Accordingly, it will remain close to the ecliptic throughout its visit to the inner solar system.

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